


Vivre libre ou courir

by Bailey41



Category: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Compliant, F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22851511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bailey41/pseuds/Bailey41
Summary: …she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, “Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”—Evelyn Waugh,Brideshead RevisitedThis was a response to a half-jokey tumblr prompt for a late 18th-Century fanfic on Marianne x Hélöise. Post-canon. Faithful to the world of the film.August 1, 1794It is five years after the French Revolution and nearly two years into the new Republic. The king and queen are dead. Marat is dead. Robespierre is dead. The Terror is over but the “women’s clubs” that the Jacobins outlawed remain shuttered. The price of bread is beginning to stabilize.Marianne has found accommodation in this new order and is still gainfully employed as a painter. She has maintained this largely by being politically flexible with the leaders of competing factions in the National Convention.Work is work. She still takes on a small number of pupils out of an atelier on rue du Chaume (now the rue des Archives), in what was the aristocratic Marais. The neighborhood is going through what we would now call a bit of transition.
Relationships: Héloïse & Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Héloïse/Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
Comments: 46
Kudos: 132





	1. Prologue: The Kalends of August

**Author's Note:**

> To be honest, the thing that bothered me the most about the two final Parisian codas in _Portrait of a Lady on Fire_ was my own impending sense of dread for the times that the two principal characters will soon find themselves in.
> 
> Those scenes suggest a scant few years before the collapse of the _ancien régime_. What would of course follow was the upending of the social order and the age of terrible euphemisms: the Committee of Public Safety, the National Convention, the Directorate, the Consulate…
> 
> A period full of hypocritical oaths on equality and the rights of the (female) citizen, this time and place would probably not be the best time to resume a love affair between equals, but it is the world that Marianne and Hélöise were put in.
> 
> The good news is that Marianne could not see past the moment she was narrating in the film, and in this fic they meet a third, a fourth, a fifth, and a whole bunch of other times. The bad news is that it happens sometime between Year One of Equality (1792), The Terror, and The White Terror (1793-1795). At some point during these very bloody events, the hard-won attempts at enfranchisement by women in the early days of the Revolution are betrayed by both radicals and moderates in government.
> 
> As it was in the movie, the perception of time and its demands figure prominently in this telling. The First French Republic rejected the Gregorian calendar in favor of a radical, secular calendar to signify man’s triumph over the feudal past—and the start of a collective, egalitarian memory.

Year II of the French Republic, the 14th day of Thermidor, Quartidi.

————

Marianne couldn’t recall if it was a Thursday or a Friday in the old calendar. She’d kept a perpetual one in the studio but had stopped moving it forward in the weeks following the execution of Citizen Louis Capet.

That seemed a long time ago now.

Her attachment to the old method of marking the days was less about any kind of sentimentality. She was sentimental for sure, and at once still committed to whatever methods of measuring time, distances or weights were to govern this new world.

For the most part, this novel way of telling time celebrated both nature and reason, and she’d convinced herself that that was logic enough for her. But Marianne had become lousy at keeping time in general, and the ten (or was it eleven) months of this new system she’d endured so far—with its rhyming, excessively florid names and ten-day weeks—had tried her patience.

She was back to using their former names, and it was a hot day in August by any reckoning. She wasn’t about to venture outside to ask her friend the book-binder for one of his smuggled calendars from England or America. There will be time enough for that.

The pressing concern now was to find a way to keep all the sweet butter that Hélöise brought with her from spoiling. Even in the coolest place in the house, the oil in the pot had begun to separate, and it wasn’t even eight in the morning. Its faint odor conflated with the smells of the suppurating cheese in another cupboard, and the vapors from the many paints and solvents in the atelier.

Indeed, the whole floor and even the attic above was in thrall to an alien miasma. Not that it mattered to Hélöise. She was sound asleep in their bed, unperturbed by Marianne puttering about, and remarkably unaffected by the rising heat.

Until she wasn’t.

“What is with all this noise?”

“I’m trying to summon something, like breakfast.”

“Does it usually involve all this slamming and moving about?”

“Well, yes.”

“ _Adagio. E domattina_ , please?”

“ _A Dio piacendo._ ” God willing.

“What does Robespierre call Him, 'The Supreme Being?'”

“Did call Him. _Did_. My sweet.”

“Oh. How could I forget.”

It seemed rather strange then that the violence and dislocations of the last few months would find the two of them in a state of domestic quiet. More or less.

They had even settled on a kind of routine. Which was all the more extraordinary when you consider that they had both witnessed—but at some remove—the beheading of four of the most powerful men in the country, the mayor of Paris, and what remained of their camp-followers on the Place Louis XV not five days before.

The city was again on a knife’s edge. The menfolk and quite a few market women were again engaged in their favorite pastime of settling political and personal scores, in the usual sanguinary manner, and often.

Hélöise had arrived the night before in her trousers and a striped purple coat. Not that there were many _sans-culottes_ around anymore. Marianne advised her footman to remove the cockade from Heloise’s apron, all the better to blend in with the roving bands that radiated out of the Place des Vosges from the east, and the Hôtel de Ville to the west, that had been hunting Jacobin supporters for days now.

She bellows a yawn that Marianne can hear clear across the room.

“A novitiate at the convent, Marie-Fabienne, once told me a story.”

“Oh?”

“She liked me a lot. Quite a lot.”

“Am I going to like this story?”

“Come here, my not-so-little painter, and you will soon find out.”


	2. “The cherrystones hold it in.”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I played the beginning like I was in the future more than in the past because it was about making your imagination free and wild and not trying to recycle the clichés about how it is supposed to be in the past — that in the past, people were very polite, or in the past, they were not really alive; they just looked through the window and thought about the world. It's just not interesting and also not true.”_  
>    
> —Adèle Haenel on playing Heloïse. Excerpted from _Portraits of Resistance: The Cinema of Céline Sciamma_ (2019)
> 
> Exposition through dialogue and gallows humor. And no, I didn’t learn that from Littlefinger. 
> 
> And a man in a major speaking part.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marianne has a tête-à-tête with the Abbé Sieyès, her contemporary and one of the principal theorists of the Revolution. A moderate, he survived and gained greater power after the Jacobin purges. 
> 
> In the 1770s he was secretary to the bishop, and later, canon at Tréguier, in Brittany, not that far from Morbihan/Quiberon, where Héloïse’s family had their estates. (I speculate on Sieyès’ sexual orientation and i’m not at all saying it is based on fact lol)
> 
> What isn’t conjecture were the deaths of the feminist Olympe de Gouges and the revolutionary politician Manon Roland, who were guillotined within a week of each other, November 3 and 8, 1793.
> 
> The tale of Iphis and Ianthe is staged as a comedy but IMHO one of the saddest stories in Greek myth. Ovid recounts it in _Metamorphoses_ , the same book Heloïse read Orpheus and Eurydice. 
> 
> It is about two young women so in love that the god Isis had to turn one of them, Iphis, into a man so that they can marry and be received by society.

Year II, 15th day of Thermidor, Quintidi.

————

“It’s amazing how you could look so rosy and hale in times like these, my dear Marianne.”

“It’s merely this heat. Anyone would look flush.”

Taking care to avoid the shit that makes the cobbles slick on the rue Paradis-du-Marais, she walked the three blocks from her house on rue Chaume, to the garden of what was the small parish of Blancs-Manteaux. The church hadn’t been turned into a temple of reason as was Notre-Dame, but it had been a while since it held mass. 

“It’s let up from yesterday at least, and isn’t so stifling. But this English dress you have on has you floating on a bed of air. It’s Héloïse’s?”

“Yes! It’s a few years old now.”

“A lovely shade of saffron, and justly provided for the occasion. As ever.”

“For you, I try to look my best. As ever.”

Marianne takes her place on a wicker table strewn with pears, greengages and plums. 

“So impressive, for the both of you to be able to swap finery with ease. The mills in the country are always in revolt, so I’d hold on to every scrap.”

“And you look—”

“Ali—”

“Alive.” She chuckles, taking care to cover her mouth as if to regret beating him to the punch. “I suppose it’s my fault for not having all my wits about me, to not have anticipated that.”

“Ah, but you did.”

Marianne’s dear friend, the Abbé Sieyès had taken to his new nickname, ‘Monsieur Lived’—in the compound past tense—among their circle. He’d kept his head through an admixture of luck and guile this past year and made a point of saying so every time they met. 

Barely a year older than Marianne, Sieyès survived the worst of a year of depredations without so much as a real spell in prison. He’d been a veteran of several lists of enemies-of-the-republic and had even holed up for a month at Marianne’s. 

Tugging at his shock of curly red hair, now sprinkled with a little grey, Sieyès looks less like a cleric than the politician he had become, with his black linen redingote cut in the Ottoman style, unadorned save for the crepe grey armband that announced his faction. It’s by the same _tricoteuse_ that made the ones Marianne and Héloïse have taken to wearing.

Marianne adjusts her posture to better regard him and the view to the street. 

“I haven’t seen this...” She grabs at the hem of his sleeve. “...since you took me to see _Athalie_ at the Comédie. You still have Mahomet embroidered inside the collar?”

“You remembered! He leans over and turns it out to show her. “Those were different times.”

“Yes they were.”

“What year was it again?”

“1780, you were in town to see Papa. He promised to paint you, remember?”

“Yes, the queen was in attendance. How could one forget. She claimed to have loved Racine, that one. A pity she didn’t pay closer attention.”

“Ah.” Marianne gestures to the militia with their muskets at the entrance to the square. “Your detail is a lot smaller, these days.”

“You may have heard that we Maraisards are in a good way, these days.”

“Ascendant, not at all bad for swamp-dwellers, so I’m told.” Marianne takes care to avoid the attention of a passing hornet.

“As I’ve said once today already, we’ve all...”

“Yes, you’ve lived, I know.”

“But it’s good for you and your Héloïse, no?”

“Quite. I didn’t think, candidly, that your rabble would make it. I knew you would, but just...”

“I told you a faggot like me would prove useful one day.” The Abbé gestures to himself with both hands. 

Marianne laughs the kind of laugh she reserves only for the most ribald of Héloïse’s jokes. “It’s a wonderful thing too, what with priests in such a low estate, that sodomy is no longer a crime.”

“At least no longer one punishable by death. All thanks to our dear and departed friend, the Marquis de Condorcet, the peace of the Almighty be upon him.”

“It must still be a double-curse, being a priest and a faggot.”

“Or a double-cure, my dear friend... We’ve lost so many of them.”

“Priests or faggots?”

“Friends.”

She pauses to acknowledge the turn in the conversation. 

“Yes, Joseph, we have lost far too many.” She takes care to use his given name. She looks away and pours him a glass of wine. “Where’d you come from?”

“You mean now? Straight from the Tuileries.” The palace, headquarters of the Maraisards. “After a contentious luncheon of quail.”

“They were still alive?”

Sieyès chirps and wags his finger. 

“We could use your humor. Us toads can afford to be witty now. But the quails, which I assure you were very much dead, were more alive than the Jacobins that were stacked like boxwood outside the Hôtel de Ville.”

Marianne winces and shields her eyes. “Boxwood. A fine time to be so... particular.”

“I’m sorry. I’d assumed you and Héloïse were inured to the kind of bloodlet—”

“No one can get used to _any_ of it, Joseph. When your erstwhile colleagues—”

“—Our opponents.”

“Your former opponents came after the women, we lost our appetite for a lot of things.” She crooks her right eyebrow, the one that arches slightly higher. 

“I’m a little saddened that you think I could still have done something about that. It this you, or your better half talking?” Sieyès rolls a Damson plum towards him and takes a bite. He smarts. “As I recall, her fervor burned hotter than yours in the early days. Then again she always burned hot.” 

He ends with a knowing wink. 

“You never believed that story of the bonfire at Morbihan.”

“I never said I never believed it, I said it wasn’t entirely credulous. There’s a difference.”

“I never could understand the distinction, dear Joseph.” 

“Your love rising like the Phoenix. It must have seemed for all the world that Sappho herself willed Fire himself to lap at her.”

“That stunning piece of drollery was funnier the first few times.”

“A joke among faggots, and not a good one, I’m afraid. But it earned a chuckle from you when you came to visit me at Tréguier. You were inconsolable then.” He grabs at his heart. 

Marianne beams and playfully tosses a runty pear at him. “Don’t remind me. And then you just had to compound my sorrow, reading me the story of Iphis and Ianthe.”

“That story had a happy ending!”

“For whom!?”

They stop to watch one of the guards turn away a man loitering along the fence.

Marianne continues. “This terrible fever your soldier friends, the Marquis, and that Mr. Jefferson—“

“He was a handsome fox, wasn’t he—“

—brought back from America. It is like a pox that now has every emperor and despot in Christendom come knocking on our door with a cure for.”

“You’ve now come to regret our little experiment?”

“No, just the last two years of it. I miss Madame Roland. Héloïse still cries for Madame de Gouges. At least once a week.”

“Olympe was my friend too.”

Marianne looks down, her shoe dispersing gravel. Sieyès tries another tack. 

“But do you miss the queen?”

“No, not at all. Or not yet.” She sighs “...but if _you_ don’t get things better, I just might.”

“Ha. You were a Girondin after all. It’s a terrible burden you’ve left me, but as we say, the Marais won’t be filled in in a day.”

“So the mosquitos keep telling me. You have any rosewood oil you can spare?”

Marianne and the Abbé turn to see Héloïse as she negotiates the square in great, determined strides. She has a palaver with Sieyés’ guards. 

“Iphis commeth.”

Both wave at her. “I thought I was Iphis.”

“Don’t think you weren’t. But she’s wearing the trousers now.”

“Those were mine! They were bequeathed to me by an old miller from Nîmes in ‘89.”

“And yet here you are wearing _her_ dress.”


	3. Lighter Than Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Stupid girl,” I imagined these men [Picasso, Matisse] saying to me... “You can be one or the other, a woman who desires and is desired or a painter. Choose.”_  
>   
>  —Mary Gordon, _Spending_ (1998)
> 
> Those two dudes always got it twisted.
> 
> A lead-in to the Third Time She Saw Her™️, which I hope to get done soon. I’m still coming to terms with setting a story of two people, still very much in love, in the aftermath of national trauma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also get the present day Noémie Merlant twisted with her 18th-century alter-ego. But only by a little. 
> 
> Madame Roland is referenced. She was de facto interior minister, and for a time was the most powerful woman in France until her Jacobin enemies brayed for her downfall and guillotined her.
> 
> So is Sophie, the Marquise de Condorcet, who along with her husband, were some of the great humanists of the age, both champions of women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Fluent in English, she translated the works of the American pamphleteer and revolutionary Thomas Paine. She ran a popular “women’s club” frequented by the great and the good. She survived The Terror, but her husband took poison rather than capture in July 1793.
> 
> Candy for supper and fat jokes. Enlightened but not totally there. I mean, this was still an age where it was still widely believed you could get most contagions from humors in the air.
> 
> PS Saint-Domingue is the colonial name of the Hatian Republic. Talk about a reckoning...

————

So what were you and our dear confessor warbling about before I landed?”

“It’s funny you use those words. He described me in your dress, metaphorically, as one of those, ah, Mongolfièrs.”

Héloïse gets her back up from the bed. 

“No! That blind horse! You are as slight as a forest nymph. He has clearly taken leave of his sight.”

Marianne looks up from where she lay to see a glowering woman, foreshortened, her features in shadow but still perceptible. Her brassy hair a tangled nimbus, lit from behind by the crowd of candles on the prie-dieu. 

“No, he hadn’t mean it that way, he merely stated that your dress made me rise above the ground, as if from a column of air...”

“Oh, a compliment. Are you certain?” 

Marianne picks at a loose feather from her pillow. “Yes, my sweet... not at all an outrage.“

Héloïse resumes her supine position with a soft thud, fluffing the outlying edges of the tufted blanket not taken up by either of their bodies. She adjusts her pillow, folds her arms behind her nape, and turns her head to face Marianne. Her lips are pursed in a soft smile. Without much thought, she picks at the ruffles on the low collar of her nightdress. She reaches out to caress Marianne’s hair, sweeping away the errant strands over her brow. 

“I swear by the old Triune God, the way you two exchange glances, keeping secrets from me, you conspire with him at your leisure, to draw out my jealousy.”

“My god wouldn’t that kind of affection be something! I don’t think our governors and law-givers have even thought of such an... offense against nature.”

“Quite! But isn’t our friend both governor and law-giver again?” Héloïse is keen on the news that Sieyès faction has benefited the most from the fall of the Jacobins.

“That may well be, and we shall see soon enough.”

“Well, I must call on him to get the club going again. It has been shuttered for far too long.”

“We did speak some about your ‘fervor.’”

“Ah, did you now?”

Marianne grins, her teeth shiny in the lamplight. She mimics the sound of a burning musket fuse.

Both laugh. “But I believe we might be the last of our company.”

Héloïse demurs. “There’s still dear Hélène, no? Her husband, wasn’t he on the Committee of Public Safety? Or was it General Security?”

“—I can’t keep up of who is and isn’t on what hanging tribunal.”

“That’s a different office, the one that does the hanging, silly.”

Marianne ignores her. “Anyway, she’s left. they’re off to Saint-Domingue. Left in haste. Thought he had his finger to the wind. Cast his lot with the crowd that just...” She struggles for a kinder word. 

“—Got themselves killed.”

“Quite. But managed to flee before the mob. I meant to tell you from my luncheon with Joseph.”

“This last one?”

“No the one before.”

“I‘m left out on so much of this revolutionary gossip. From all these secret assignations.”

A frown begins to form on Marianne. “They are never kept from you.”

“So easy to tease, my dark one.” She feels for Marianne’s navel through her gown. The middle finger of her left hand lingers along the depression. 

Marianne’s breathing is now unstill. So is her own. 

But not yet. This touch was a promise. 

Héloïse pulls back her hand. “Get up and play me some Lully. I’ve been missing the way you play him.”

“Only if you sing with me.”

“You’d like that? I’m afraid that I’ve lost the sonorites that once kept you so... well _seduced.”_

“Euphorically...” Marianne acknowledges but won’t take the bait in its entirety. “I love it when you sing! But you never sang a single note when we fell in love.”

“Oh I did. And like a lute with too many strings, your deft fingers made me sing.”

“And very nimble, my love.” Marianne draws her closer. “And you rhyme too. The Eurterpe of my bedchamber.”

“No. More, more... wanton.”

“Who then?”

“Erato.”

Marianne inches her face forward. “Erato. You read about her? As the favorite? Of the abbess, or of that red-haired novitiate?”

Confirming nothing, she winks at her lover. “Yes. She wasn’t my favorite though.”

“Did she make you sit on her lap? When you went to her and not the priest, for confession?”

“Wouldn’t you like to find out?”

“Will it ruin my character?”

“I made quick work of that so long ago.” Héloïse draws back with an impish grin. “But no! Let’s go to the other room. Play me some Lully first. I never give up my charms so easily.”

Marianne pouts. “So you say... But I’m happy here, where we are. Will you take candied lavender instead?”

Héloïse’s green eyes grow wide. “What else have you been keeping from me?!”

Marianne retrieves a linen sachet between the headboard and the cushion, taking care to avoid the muzzle of the pistol she keeps there.

She takes a shard between her teeth and feeds it to Héloïse. The sugar crystals and the dried petals disintegrate with the crash of their lips. The cloying sweetness mixes with the tobacco they had earlier, dissolving in the wet coil of their tongues.

Héloïse takes the little pouch by the laces as she breaks the kiss. “There’s a lot here. It could be a long night.”

————

“Have you seen a fat one?”

The clock strikes three.

“A fat what?” Héloïse shifts from being the small spoon and turns to face her interrogator.

“A nymph, in the wood?”

“Not if you count the fuller’s wife up the street.” Héloïse is very impressed with her reply.

“She’s awfully kind, I don’t find that joke that funny.” Marianne clicks her purple tongue in disapproval. 

“Oh? But she does.”

Héloïse leads her eye to one of the many portraits of herself that litter their home. This is the only one in their bedchamber that isn’t a miniature. You can still read her smile in the dying light.

This is the first that Marianne ever painted of her. Their first attempt at Héloïse‘s true likeness, at any rate. 

They still call it the wedding portrait. Or by another name. In a foreign tongue. 

There was English instruction at the salon of the Marquise de Condorcet. Sophie to her intimates, she even took both of them to Ducis’ adaptation of _Othello_ not two years ago, and had a lot to say on a translation that she asserted was rife with error. In another war a long time ago, her grandfather parlayed with the Duke of Marlborough, and sought favorable terms with him at Ramilies—by all accounts, in perfect English.

 _“‘Womans in Emerald Dress.’”_ Héloïse mocks Marianne. “You never could abide me setting your grammar right, and it didn’t take until Madame de Condorcet affirmed it, much to your humiliation.”

“You know how I hate being bested. Or corrected. By anyone.”

Their eyes linger on the portrait. 

Héloïse’s eyes begin to well up. “I miss the Marquise, I miss the Marquis. I miss Olympe. And I miss Manon so much, Marianne.” She uses the familiar name of Marie-Jeanne Roland. 

Without a word, Marianne clasps both of her hands and gently kisses over her eyelids. 

“I’ve lost so much these last few years... I know we’ve all lost so much. l’ve lost so much.” Héloïse kisses the tips of their joined fingers. “My heart was hollowed out. But when I found you a second time, I knew it would be full again.”

Marianne lets her speak. Hands still firmly clasped, they stare into each other’s eyes. 

“There was a time I would have plead for the Mongolfièrs to spirit us away in one of their flying machines. I don’t recognize this city any more. I don’t know who our friends are any more. I indulged a fantasy, that if I could break what bound us immobile to this sphere, we could be free.” 

“We are free. Not safe. No, not yet. But free.”

They can hear the wind as it whispers through the leaves of the horse chestnut tree at the foot of the street.

“Are you still so certain? I’m not so sure if this place we fought for is still the same place. Not after what we’ve seen.” Héloïse heaves. “...But one thing I know. You’ve been here, with me, the entire time.”


	4. Nougatine: or The Third Time I Saw Her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty._  
>   
>  —Evelyn Waugh, _Brideshead Revisited_
> 
>  _leurs yeux s’ouvrirent..._  
>  —Luke 24:31
> 
> This was a toughie. Short but tough. 
> 
> Indulge me. Part of the reason it seemed likely that Héloïse had every intention of seeing Marianne again was the p. 28 portrait. She sent that to be mounted at the Salon, to take pride-of-place in the Galerie d’Apollon, full in the knowledge that Marianne—an accredited member of the royal academy through her father—would see it. 
> 
> That and the Salon being a closed loop of artists and patrons for much of this period. It wasn’t an art museum. Everyone knew everybody. It was primarily a way to buy existing work or commission new work. 
> 
> There is manipulation at work here. Lol. 
> 
> There is a character death. Not one of the principals, but someone consequential.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you know that the _torrone_ , or almond nougat candy was invented in the 1440s to celebrate the Duke of Milan marrying off his daughter? That the town of Cremona was part of her dowry? 
> 
> Those facts are irrelevant to this chapter. Save for Héloïse having acquired a taste for fluffy _torroni_ while in Milan and no longer cares for French nougatine. 
> 
> That and having been sold into marriage in the 1770s. I mean...
> 
> The Place des Vosges was called the Place Royale before the Revolution. 
> 
> The Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank rapidly became the locus of great wealth in Paris in the years immediately before the collapse of the _ancien régime_. A number of streets and hôtel particuliers would later be demolished to create the Boulevard Saint-Germain, including rue Taranne and the structures on it.
> 
> Roman Catholics have traditionally had a name associated with their “name day,” which is the saint whose feast day their birthday falls on; and if it isn’t their given name, it is sometimes a secondary name. The tradition continues to this day, even among some Protestant denominations.

July 3, 1787, Tuesday.

————

There is still some debate on exactly what led to the deaths of so many children to the west and north of the Marais, and on the other side of the Seine in the early summer of 1787.

A pestilential sump not far from the Place Royale had bred a hardy variety of mosquito and it was assumed that an exotic incidence, possibly the yellow fever, was the cause. A similar outbreak not two years before, allegedly brought by sailors from Pointe-à-Pitre, took the lives of many traders and working people. But this new strain was visited on the noblesse, and it hit a number of families in the lower Marais and the Faubourg Saint-Germain hard.

A ten year-old girl, christened Giuseppina but called Josephine by most everyone else, had fallen ill in her home on 8 rue Taranne. She was first brought to the Carmelites on rue de Grenelle, but as her condition only worsened, she was ultimately moved to a hospice across the river, near the Priory of Saint-Martin.

Answering to Giusi, but only to her mother and the wet-nurse from Vicenza that became her constant companion, the child had been sickly from birth. She had enjoyed only a few healthy seasons from when she moved with her family to Paris in the autumn of 1780.

The family doctor had recognized the gravity of the child’s headaches and frequent nausea early enough, but was unprepared for the onset of the flu and other catastrophic symptoms. Her liver would soon fail despite an attempt at bleeding, a progression grotesquely announced by acute jaundice and a greening of her blond hair at the tips.

Giusi, once a defiant slip of a girl, did not suffer great agony. She died in her sleep on the penultimate day of June.

————

Four days later, her body was interred in the family crypt under Église Saint-Merri.

Marianne waited for the end of the requiem mass, attended by two dozen women and a few minor nobles. At the head of this sad procession was the curate and not a priest officiating. He wore the simplest, even mendicant robes. 

Women in black wearing strips of white muslin over their mouths funnel out of the church. Marianne locks eyes with two women she recognizes, and they nod. 

She walks past the nave to a side aisle and directs her gaze beyond, to another woman in black. Her profile unmistakable in her mourning dress, she towers over the short clergyman and a lanky boy idly swinging a dying censer. The woman immediately takes her leave of the men and motions Marianne to follow into an ambulatory chapel behind the high altar. 

Visible through the thin veil that covers the entirety of her face, Héloïse’s cheeks are puffy, her color drawn, her lips raw. Red from hot tears, her eyes reflect the many votive candles in the room. 

Reflexively, as if no time had passed since their last, furtive embrace on that island so long ago, she buries her face in Marianne’s hair, inhaling the scent of her scalp through the gauzy fabric. 

The essence of tuberose could not mask the fact that Héloïse had not washed her hair for days. Marianne could not have cared less. Her arms draw them close. “I am so sorry for your loss. Héloïse.” 

Héloïse whispers a faint acknowledgment and pulls back to look at her. “I wasn’t at all sure you’d come.” Her voice is coarse and broken. 

“You’ve known where I teach... the university?” 

“Yes. But not long.”

Marianne crossed the Pont-Neuf into the left bank at least once a week to teach _émigrées_ the rudiments of history painting at the College of the Four Nations. It was there that she received a note in distinctive blue iron gall ink, written in a rapid hand that she had never seen but knew at once belonged to Héloïse. 

“Was it long, her illness?”

“No. A week. She didn’t suffer.”

“You sought me when she was still alive?”

“Yes.”

“What was her name?”

“Josephine. She was Giusi to me... and Virna. The woman that you walked past to get here.” Marianne remembers a tall woman, taller than either of them, wearing a chaperon. 

“Giuseppina is from her name day. But she was baptized with another. Her true, _given_ name.”

A panic seizes Marianne, anticipating and fearing what she would hear next. 

Héloïse looks squarely at her through the veil and grasps at both her wrists, the friction from the lace of both their gloves leaving Marianne no time to recoil. 

“I named her after you.”

Marianne’s mouth is open now. Her breaths are staggered and violent and it seemed to her that the beating of her heart could be heard through the church, up the clerestory, out the west entrance, and out among the Tuesday throngs on the rue Saint-Martin. 

In the end it is their sobbing, a miserable recitative that cuts through the apse of the church. The pair hold each other up like two bent scarecrows for fear of collapsing in the side chapel. 

Wordlessly, they stay this way for a long time, a conjoined pillar of grief, a loss magnified to an impossible measure by the revelation. 

The revelation of a daughter. 

In spirit. 

Theirs.

Their Marianna. 

Marianne is left reeling, unsure of what to feel, desperate in the pain she feels for Héloïse. The woman she loves. Her only child. A namesake she never met. A name she hasn’t been called since her tuition in Italy. A likeness on a canvas. A body now moldering in a tomb. 

A loss she is now forced to come to terms with, in all of its unremitting power and devastation. 

It is Marianne that finally tears away from Héloïse. 

But not before she presses her gloved left hand, hard on Héloïse’s sternum, just below her throat. Her boldness and the audible report it makes surprises both of them, and both instinctively apprehend the significance of the gesture. 

But this was not how Marianne imagined how they would behold each other again. This was not how she imagined how they would touch each other again. Not here. Not this way. 

She looks into Héloïse’s eyes one more time and pivots on her left heel to leave. 

She runs as fast as her feet could take her. 

Home. 

————

Essential details of Héloïse’s subsequent biography would fill themselves out at a luncheon not two days later, one demanded by Héloïse herself. 

The second letter of invitation arrived by equerry to Marianne’s address. 

She was not at all curious how Héloïse had come by this information. Her studio. Her domicile. 

Ah. The salonnières present at the interment, she thought.

_My Beloved,_

_The terrible circumstances of our meeting overwhelmed me. I know it did yourself. You are the only consolation I have in this life now and I want to see you again. I need to see you again._

_I have reason to believe that you will receive what I have to say. I have nothing left to regret. I want to make a different choice now. I want to make it with you._

_Tell Claudio, my footman that you concede to the appointed time and place I have told him._

_Or tell him of another time and place. I will be there. Please put your trust in him._

_Your Héloïse_

Accompanying the letter was a small box. 

A present. 

“What’s inside?”

_”Torroni, signorina.”_

Marianne takes one of the squares. She takes a bite. The scent of rosewater, the delicacy of the soft merengue and the sweetness of the honey are offset by the crunch of the almonds. 

It’s enough to drive her to tears. 

It does.


	5. Page 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

>   
> The fourth time she saw her. No point counting after this one, sister ;)  
>   
> And spit trails.  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Ornament of the immortal Graces.  
>  Followers of the Mother of Love,  
> Render to beauty ever new weapons,  
> measure for measure._  
>   
> —Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, _Cantata: L'amour piqué par une abeille._ 1710

July 5, 1787, Thursday

————

The Café de Chartres, not four years old but already an institution to the great and the good, was practically empty that afternoon. Set in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, the great room of the establishment—all gilding and white plaster—had the effect of amplifying Marianne’s presence, seated as she was, wearing an austere black dress and capelet that belied none of the fine material used in its making. 

Marianne arrived a little early and is perusing the English and German newspapers that had been left on the banquette. She is drinking a large cup of hot chocolate for the absurd sum of nine _derniers_. When she was flush with cash, she’d spend so much more for the veal stew at the nearby restaurant Beauvilliers-Le Magnifique. It isn’t the first time she’d indulged herself at this café, but she’d had this pervading sense of dread for months now, that they were coming on to leaner times. 

Fontaine, the proprietor, approaches. “Madame, the Countess will be here presently. She is alighting on the rue de Richelieu.”

Héloïse is still in her mourning habit, but this time without the tulle mask. She is surprised that Marianne is dressed in the same manner.

They embrace. “Thank you for continuing to grieve with me.” Her voice has improved some. 

They sit down. “It’s the least I could do.” 

“Especially after what I said. Thinking back now, I really should have waited to tell you, to not burden you, to not pummel you in the way I did... I can’t have you running away from me all the time.”

A joke. They both smile. The pleasure and the novelty of it sink in. 

They talk at length about Giusi. Héloïse is resolved to think only on the joy she brought to all who knew her, over tea, biscuits, a potage of rabbit, and flat waffles with a compote of oranges. It’s the most Héloïse has eaten in days and Marianne can’t help but notice her appetite. 

Marianne offers her the last waffle and Héloïse snatches it from her hand. “This is going to sound unnatural, but she did take after you. She raised her eyebrows, like you do, and it would give me pause... every time.”

“That’s...” Marianne breaks off.

Héloïse does not press her. She stares out the window to the garden beyond. “You know I saw you eating in here once. Must have been two summers ago. With a priest.”

The events of the last week have stunted Marianne’s capacity for surprise. “I saw you too. Twice. Once, really. The year after your return. The other time was through the painting you submitted...” 

Marianne waits for one of Héloïse’s tells, and she obliges. A slight, almost imperceptible flutter of the eyelids. 

She laughs, with a glint in her eye that Marianne hadn’t seen since they were last in bed. “You couldn’t have thought me subtle, not with that one.”

A lump forms in Marianne’s throat. “No. Not at all.”

Héloïse looks around to make sure no one is looking their way. “You needed to know how much I _thought_ about you.” The emphasis left little room for ambiguity. What she did next left none all. She grabs at Marianne’s left wrist with not a little force and kisses her exposed knuckles, inhaling the attar of rose that lingered on Marianne’s fingers. 

“Let’s get out of here. Now.”

They hold hands in the carriage ride to Marianne’s house. 

————

They barely make it up the stairs. 

It is a haze of urgent commotion. 

Layers of heavy black fabric, and other lighter garments are sloughed off like so much dead skin. 

Hot breath.

“I still know your body.”

On hot breath. 

“I’ve missed yours.”

“I promised you that I would remember.”

“I promised you as much.”

“You have.”

“I kept my word.”

“As have I.”

In a word, lubricious. An unkempt splendor of tears, spit, sweat, come and more tears, smeared shiny on so much skin. 

The draft of their long, tangled bodies sink Marianne’s bed. Strong limbs are leveraged, straddled and contracted to gain access, to grant access. 

“I belong to you.”

“You’ve always belonged to me.”

“Then take.”

Palms and fingers constantly arrest screams that would ring through the quarter like so many profane bells if they were let out. 

“Marianne.”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“I never thought that I would ever hear—”

Héloïse growls back. “I’ve loved no one but you.”

————

“So I meant to ask you. Where is your husband?”

“A thoughtful thing to ask, after a little adultery, don’t you think?” She bites her upper lip.

Marianne laughs at the second joke they’ve exchanged. “Ah, of course.”

“Who knows. In Naples, Claudio tells me... You need not worry. He left us long ago. Hasn’t been back in Paris for more than two years. Showed up in Versailles, at the Assembly of Notables this past winter. Took father’s old place. Never even bothered to see Giusi.” 

Steeling herself, Héloïse exhales. “May God have mercy on his pitiable soul.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.”

A pause. 

“...Héloïse.” Marianne tries to say another word but nothing escapes her mouth. 

They regard each other again and again. Hardly blinking, they carefully observe the slight lines the intervening years had etched on their faces. Though their features are sharper, time, has in this respect, been nothing but extraordinarily kind. 

Héloïse resumes. “A friend that you may know, by reputation, Madame Lavoisi—“

“Oh. You even know my friends?” She pinches Héloïse on the wrist. 

“Don’t interrupt me.” She pleads playfully. “Now where was I? Yes, Marie-Anne Lavoisier told me he spent lavishly on a banquet for the Duke of Orléans, who stood him up. The wastrel...”

Héloïse provides more context. Gianpietro had taken to calling himself Jean-Pierre since their return to Paris and had effectively bought back her father’s old title, the one he held as a member of the old Frankish nobility, the title he took with him to the grave. 

But it wasn’t for any affection for Héloïse’s ancestral name. He had little love for anyone but himself in any case. There’s a sharp edge of bitterness when she spoke of his usurpation of ‘count,’ an honorific that would have belonged to her older sister. If she had lived. Were she a man. 

To hear her tell it, the general failure of her husband’s family at gaining favor with the Austrians that ruled Milan forced him to seek his fame elsewhere, and the Bourbon court in France seemed as good a place to ingratiate himself. He cashed in a reasonable portion of his inheritance from the mining of saltpeter and moved his family to Paris. He thought himself clever, being an absentee landlord to her family’s significant estates in Brittany. 

However, his ambitions effectively left his principal interests in the hands of his mother-in-law in Lombardy.

“The worst mistake he ever did make.” Héloïse is suddenly very animated in her recounting. “The details remain nebulous to me but Mama did what his kin never could do, and got the Austrians to buy the whole thing, the business, with her at the head for good measure. Grew the concern to something unimaginable... it’s now under imperial patronage, and she’s made enough out of it to buy his relatives out.”

“Gunpowder, whatever shall we do without it...”

“—And they all adore her for it. They’d disown him twice over for the money she brings in.” Héloïse snorts. “She is plotting something, for our estates, in Morbihan, I know it. But I’m happy to take her money in the meantime.” 

“It is a handsome carriage, the one that takes you around.”

“I never took you for someone who took notice of those kinds of things.”

“No, not really. Unless it’s worthy of note.” Marianne runs her fingers up and down Héloïse’s right forearm, taking care to feel the golden down on her skin, erect in the humidity. 

“The witch, she and that oaf killed my sister... But I can’t hate her entirely. If your father hadn’t created the instrument that sold her into marriage, I would have never met you.”

“But I created the selfsame instrument that...”

“Then that’s probably why we’re naked in your bed right now.” She reaches out to fondle Marianne’s breast.

Marianne blushes like a turnip and covers her eyes. 

“Such is life. We’ll take it as it lies. And from hence, a lot of it, lying down.” Héloïse leans forward, gently pries her hand from her face, and kisses her. It is deep, rewarding and breathy. Something Marianne looks forward to getting used to again.

“Are you hungry?”

“Not yet. But I fully intend to stay the night. I’ll stay the week if you would have me. I must warn you that I won’t be as happy as am right this moment.”

“You’re happy?”

“I am. I only wish that you could have met my little girl.”

Héloïse’s eyes begin to well up. She turns her head to look at the rough-hewn beams that hold up the roof. The tears stream down to her ears.

“I’m sorry. Not these. These are tears of joy. For the most part. I promise.” She dries her eyes with the corner of a pillowcase.

Marianne squeezes Héloïse’s hand. “I have pupils tomorrow. Would you like to be here for that?”

“I’ve been wanting to see you teach.”

“You have?”

“Yes. And one thing. Will I finally get a better likeness of you?

“After all this time? That’s the first thing you want from me?”

“Yes. But I already got the thing I first wanted from you.”

“Oh... Oh.” Marianne rewards her with a dimply grin.

“Well you won’t have to be nude in it. I mean not unless you want to be?”

“Héloïse...” Marianne covers her mouth again. But not at all for modesty. Not a week ago could she have ever imagined that she would be here, with her.

“Little you in my little book has served me very well, but I think I could arrange for a more substantial commission, for your self-portrait, in oil?”

“Why would you think I would want money for such a thing?”

“Don’t sell yourself short now. I’ve a head for these things. I know a hundred men and quite a few very respectable women who would pay to see you at the next salon in appalling states of undress, as Diana with her bow, maybe?”

“You’ve thought of me as Diana?”

“Well... Seeing that the goddess of the hunt doesn’t really exist, no, I dreamt of you, as Diana.”

“Well now! And I thought I was being witty.” The specific memory evoked by Héloïse’s riposte is welcome and overwhelming. For both of them.

“You are, my love. Come to think of it, maybe I don’t find the thought of sharing you with all various and sundry to be in my best interest. As I’ve said once today already, you’ve only ever belonged to me.”

“A pity we never settled on a dowry. You got me for a song.”

“And my goodness did I not sing like a catbird for your legendary charms. And it’s not eventide yet.”

“Relieve me of a few more coins and promise to sing for your supper too.”

“Don’t think I won’t, Marianne...”

“In my name too, this act of tender.”

“It’s such a beautiful name, a frightfully beautiful name. You have no idea how often I utter it.”

“It only accrues value every time you say it, my dear countess... Especially, in, ah...various states of undress.”

“My dear! This premium you’ve placed on my arousal will land me in the poorhouse. You have a head for these things, too.”

“A tongue comes with it, too.” Marianne did not have to lick her lips. It’s Héloïse who now turns a shade of beet red. She fans herself theatrically with her right hand. 

“It’s all my fault, all this dreary talk of money and ownership. Let’s not discuss this now... I’m sure we will come to an agreement on the _many, many_ lovely things we shall render together, and all in good time.”

Without averting her gaze, Héloïse sticks out her tongue to moisten the tips of her left index and middle fingers, gently cleaving the digits to draw out the salty trace of their recent ministrations. The soft, viscid sounds, and the thickening trails of spit has her audience at a total loss, and it’s Marianne’s turn to fan herself.

Marianne whimpers, sighs, the polychromy of her irises gleaming in the late afternoon light. “Now I’m the one in your debt. Please collect, and soon. Please.”

Héloïse giggles in unmistakable triumph. “As I said, all in good time. Now, my goddess, tell me everything that’s happened to you since we left things off.”

Marianne shifts to a slightly elevated position with the help of a pillow. “You can stay the week. It will take that long.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. I’ve already sent for my change of clothes when I dismissed the coachman...”

“My God, you thought this all out. Really.”

“Well, no. Not eating everything in sight at de Chartres.” Héloïse scans the bedchamber and the rooms beyond the open door. “You have a lot of room here. It’s as if you were waiting for me.”

“For you? more than I ever dared hope.” Marianne did clear the rest of her day.

Héloïse props her face up with all ten fingers and screams. 

Like a child. 

“Ahhhh!!!!”


	6. The Lines of My Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Little soul, you charming little wanderer,  
>  my body’s guest and partner,  
> Where are you off to now?  
> Somewhere without color, savage and bare?  
> Never again to share a joke.  
> _  
> —Hadrian, Emperor, 138 AD  
>   
>  _Miss W[alker] laughed and said we were well matched. We soon got to kissing again on the sofa … At last I got my right hand up her petticoats and after much fumbling got through the opening of her drawers and touched (first time) the hair and skin of queer._  
>   
>  _She never offered the least resistance … When dusk, she asked (I had said I was at no time likely to marry—how far she understood me I could not quite make out), ‘If you never had any attachment, who taught you to kiss?’ I laughed and said how nicely that was said, then answered that nature taught me. I could have replied, ‘And who taught you?’_  
>   
>  —Ann Lister, Diary entry, October 8, 1832 AD  
>   
> Two EPIC queens. I get that the other one was a Roman emperor too;) Hadrian, after his adoptive father, ruled the Empire at its greatest extent.  
>   
> PS: “Skin of queer.” So that’s what they called it. Lol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still in 1787. 
> 
> Having Héloïse write letters was fun:  
>   
>  _“I plant a kiss on this sheet of paper. And you shall do the same on receipt of it, my Marianne. A duplicate seal, on this, my bill of tender, as each and every letter I write you is. They grow, like so many courses of masonry, the impregnable keep of our love.”_
> 
> And Sophie shows up. At least in name.
> 
> Once facing the precinct of the Hôtel des Invalides, the parish of Saint Valerie was demolished in the 19th century, and her cult has been housed in the nearby basilica of Saint Clothilde since 1857. 
> 
> One of the legends surrounding Saint Valerie of Limoges was that she was beheaded for her faith, for refusing betrothal to a pagan duke of Aquitaine. Informally, she becomes a patroness to the coming storm. But we’re not there yet. 
> 
> There is way too much reunion to get through and that’s gonna need a few. 
> 
> Héloïse quotes an aria excerpted from: “Notte placida e cheta” (Quiet and Placid Night), George Friedrich Handel, 1707-1708. _Handel: Le Cantate per il Marchese Ruspoli (Le cantate italiane di Handel, Vol. 2)_. Translation Copyright, Glossa Music, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

July 7, 1787, Saturday

————

The pair walk west to the end of rue de Grenelle, past the Carmelite monastery and pause to take comfort under an allée of chestnut trees that in turn receive shade from the small church of Sainte-Valère. 

Marianne looks up at the spiky green fruit beginning to appear on the twigs. “You trust him a great deal, don’t you?” 

Héloïse looks back at the footman trailing them a short distance and knows instinctively what Marianne is getting at. “Oh Claudio? Let’s see... when you and I were first met, only slightly less than the faith l put in Sophie.” 

Marianne smiles at the recitation of her name. “Ah. How is she?”

“She’s still with Mama. And now knows a great deal about extracting saltpeter from rock. It’s too long a story to get into and I’d truly love to tell you all about it when we get home.” 

Marianne kicks at the gravel. “You live not too far?”

“I meant yours. I’m not ready to be anywhere near my own house... Giusi, she loved that house. I’ll take you there one day.” She stanches a tear from her right eye with her gloved hand. She tries at a joke. “You picked an awful time to rid yourself of mourning clothes.”

Marianne closes the gap between them. She brushes Héloïse’s exposed forearm through her white glove and lets it drop to play at the creases of Héloïse’s black linen cape, and then to her own calico jacket, at her waist, where it meets a matching pale-rose petticoat. “I would like that very much. But only when you are ready to do so.” 

Héloïse takes in the surround. Satisfied with the desolation of people and place, her hands, now at waist level, gently tugs at Marianne’s extended fingers. Probing, she then boldly grasps an entire hand for at least a minute, until she feels she’s held on for too long and attempts to let go. Marianne denies her and gently squeezes back her affection. “We can try at Icarus a mite bit more, my courage.”

They swap gentle grins. That will have to do. A kiss won’t. Not here. They finally let go. 

Héloïse makes another attempt at levity. “The house. It’s far too cavernous to have just one resident witch.” 

Marianne snickers obligingly. “Which house.”

“Well you haven’t seen _my_ house.”

“You mean for me to be impressed?”

Héloïse bites her lower lip and glances shyly at Marianne. “I am a little house-proud. I mean, for a witch.”

“I remember another house. You wore a riding coat with a hood then.”

“You were bewitched then? Living like a church mouse in that drafty room, when you were failing, failing miserably at deceiving me?”

“The spirits of turpentine gave me away.”

Héloïse’s countenance brightens at the memory. “I caught on a lot later than you think. The room smelled like that before you arrived. But I suppose you’re accustomed to the vapors.”

“Quite. Besides it seems my counter-spell never broke. Took a few years, but here we are.” 

“Saw all your brushes, the thin sable ones, the broad ones for the underpainting, even the fan-shipped ones that look like ostrich feathers, but I never saw your broom.”

“Never needed one there. In the black of the night, through thick and thin, like the wind, I rode—.”

Héloïse hurriedly cups Marianne’s mouth and responds with her eyes. Then a sharp intake of breath as she unmuzzles her lover. She takes another bite of her lower lip.

Marianne reaches for Héloïse’s right hand, barely scraping tulle through the thin white lambskin before withdrawing her fingers. They struggle to maintain some composure. Héloïse leans on a trunk and barely manages to form whatever it is she wanted to say next. 

Marianne breaks the silence first, and starts in in a high, immoderate clip. “It’s a shame you cut down my rhyme, before its time. So, anyway, my sweet, you like taking your walks between a convent, an abbey and to this parish?”

In relief, Héloïse lets out a near fathomless sigh, and joins in the conversation. “You know the patroness saint here?” She looks up to the spire, careful to shield her eyes from the mid-afternoon sun. 

Marianne nods. “Yes, I do. Saint Valerie ...of Aquitaine. Lost her head on a block.”

Héloïse directs their gaze at eye level to a niche on the wall with the saint’s likeness in soft stone.

“Venerated, as a ceplophore, she cradles her severed head in her arms for eternity.”

Marianne clucks her disapproval. “The things the holy sisters taught us. The Ursulines didn’t talk about her much. Not that I recall.” 

“You were at convent on rue Saint-Jacques? I learn a new thing about you every day. But you know this, your education as a painter, in Naples, in Milan.”

“They don’t have that tradition there, painting saintly women bearing their decapitated heads. It’s only common to us, common to our people.”

Héloïse purrs a laugh. “What a surprise. Awfully theatrical, isn’t it, adopting a patron hallow who chose—“

“—death over marriage?”

“No. Her one true faith, over marriage.” 

Héloïse stares back at her a little too long to hammer the point home. 

The footman could have seen Marianne blush from where he stood some twenty paces from them, had he not been adjusting the black crepe scarf he’s tied to his waist like a sword-knot. (A sign too, of his bereavement.)

Héloïse scolds: “Always, the one with the stinging responses. In that way, you’ve changed not at all.”

Marianne chuckles. “You remember, the first words I ever said to you?” 

“I was standing at the edge of a precipice. How could anyone forget? Ah! Great loves are often worthy of theater. You’ve paid dearly to watch Rameau at the opera, no?”

“That is what we have, a great love?”

Héloïse recoils, affecting shock. “My Gentlewoman! Do you doubt it?”

“No! Especially not after this week. But I prefer de Montéclair, personally.” 

Héloïse shakes her head. But no... I sat through his _Jeptha_ once. Insufferable drivel, managed to clear out all my ear wax. No matter, Marianne, I still love you. Right or wrong. Mostly wrong.”

Marianne laughs heartily and doesn’t bother to cover her mouth. “My God I shudder to think what they made you play in Italy.”

“Oh I never bothered to learn an instrument, it’s just that I’ve broadened my sympathies... I mean musically.”

“Ah.”

 _”Musica. Ma se vuoi il corpo e l' anima.”_ If you want the body and the soul to flourish.

_”e’ possibile—“_

Héloïse raises two fingers to Marianne’s lips. “In our tongue, please. You won’t believe this but I’m not as fluent as you yet.”

“Is it possible, that I could ever find you more lovely?”

“Oh I could have easily muddled through that! But really. I very much hope you do. But maybe this will help.” Héloïse retrieves an envelope from the silk and velvet minaudière dangling from her waist. “It’s a letter. I wrote many letters to you... So many letters never sent. I wrote them in Italy, in the Two Sicilies, here, in Paris. I have secret drawers full of them. This was from three years ago.”

Marianne takes the envelope. She can feel the laid paper, the pale shade of yellow, and knows instantly the toothy feel could have only come from one _papetier_. Duplessis, the cousin of the painter, on rue de Seine. A place they both frequented unawares. 

She unties the green flaxen ribbon holding it together and draws out four sheets of neatly folded paper. Here again was that swift hand with its sharp descenders and ascenders, breaking their bounds to rake at the sentences above and below, more or less in the same bright-blue ink of her most recent correspondence. Her words race across the pages with the briefest of margins, in rigid lines like strakes on the hull of a man-of-war. 

Héloïse tugs at Marianne’s sleeve, at the elbow, straining at the thin border lace. “Let’s go inside the chapel and you shall read it there, on one of the pews. One of them has a window, facing west.”

They enter and cross themselves before crossing the empty nave. 

————

_3 October 1784  
Place Saint-Anne, Rennes_

_My Beloved,_

_I thought about you today. The moment from when I woke, all through breakfast, at toilette with Giusi, and on the carriage ride to Rennes. As I was saying in my last letter, my mind has been left in a state of disquiet, and having my daughter on this trip has eased me of my melancholy some, and I hope to be rid of it by the time we arrive in Paris._

_You would find Giusi’s present disposition agreeable. I know I expressed some hesitation in an earlier missive from the summer, but I’m not at all ashamed in saying now, that she really takes after you. More on that tomorrow. I’ll take my ink and paper with me._

_I wonder where you are. I imagine you at your studio, toiling away, grinding small desiccated bugs into binding oil to make that bright red I still vividly remember from your painting case, but you must purchase all your pigments at the ready. Which is just as well, as the thought of all those ugly bugs is making me itch._

_My love, are you thinking of me? I bethought, in all selfishness, the possibility that Providence should have us of the same mind—which is to say equally besotted, right this moment._

_My glass pen is aquiver, my hand not true, at the very thought. I draw from the inkwell and the charge is heavy and inconstant, the pen too wet, the very surface of the table unsure. I think of you now, your lustrous skin, the scent of it, the shiny umber of your hair set against your gentle brow, your imperial nose, the swell of your breasts, the strength of your arm, the warm quick of you in the span between my fingers, the terrible, daily toll you take on my senses._

_I quiver too. I cling to the memory of the times you remarked on my beauty. You shall find me vain for saying so, but on my darkest days, I recall every instance and my heart is full to overflowing, even for a moment._

_It is times like this that I know I shall see you again. You shall see me again, and reclaim intact, with all of its virtue, fervor and majesty—in all of its majesty, the love we had. What we shall have once more._

_I went with Sophie to pay a visit to a friend of Mama not a year after we parted, before I was wed. It was at some villa in Bergamo, filled with polite, but all the same, unpleasant company._

_After luncheon they brought out a quartet with a soprano. A cello and a fortepiano for the continuo, and two violins, and her voice for the higher melodies._

_They sung a cantata that Handel himself wrote for the Marchese di Rispoli. Do you know of this appointment and what works he wrote during his time in Rome? I didn’t know this at the time but I’ve since been told that it was a glorious time for Handel._

_I needn’t tell you I was weeping when the young woman, and she couldn’t have been more than fifteen years of age, sang “Quiet and Placid Night.” Do you know it? I have the sheet music, but if you know it, call your memory to your aid as I can’t describe it._

_I do have the words._

_For now I feel you spread  
your calm and peaceful wings,  
courteous dream, the pupils feel heavy  
Please aid this  
miserable heart, Love;  
allow me to reach  
that which i so yearn for;  
come to me, Love,  
for I close my eyes and dream_

_Luci belle,  
vaghe stelle,  
pur vi miro  
placidette.  
vezzosette  
verso me.  
Son felice,  
se mi lice  
lo sperare  
al mio amor  
grata mercé._

_[Beautiful lights,  
faraway stars,  
I watch you,  
peaceful,  
beautiful,  
coming towards me.  
I will be in joy  
if allowed  
to wait  
for the graceful mercy  
of my love.]_

_It isn’t anything I can sing to you. But I would like to if you want me to. At least, we needn’t talk about it now._

_Sophie had to help carry me out as I feigned some dreadful illness. She’d been the only one I could ever confide in. I haven’t seen her in two years, but she most assuredly misses you._

_I plant a kiss on this sheet of paper. And you shall do the same on receipt of it, my Marianne. A duplicate seal, on this, my bill of tender, as each and every letter I write you is. They grow, like so many courses of masonry, the impregnable keep of our love._

_I remain,_

_Your Héloïse_

————

Marianne would later inscribe in her diary, and with little apology “that tears, not unlike the molten rock, that I, as a child, saw from the Bay of Naples pour from the sides of Vesuvius” were surging now. 

She kisses the page with Héloïse’s salutation, testing the fastness of the ink. She blurts half a joke through her sobs. “I’m not sure if I should kiss you here or find the curate to take my confession.” 

“Well there isn’t anyone here but I’m suitably attired?”

Marianne leans forward, and bravely. For all the wedding kisses that chapel had ever witnessed, it isn’t anything chaste.

“And I was so vexed, wanting to touch your hand in the churchyard.”

“These other letters, they are all in Paris, at your house.” 

“Yes.”

“Will it be too long before I get to read _all_ of them?”

Héloïse touches Marianne’s face. “I’m sure that can be arranged. But you’ll have read all of them before you can hold me to my threat to sing any of them.” She uses the mesh of her gloves to wipe away both their tears. Come, let’s both try to face the world like the proud witches that we are. Let’s fetch Claudio and let’s have the three of us some lunch? Yes?”

She nods her assent and gives a buss to the back of Héloïse’s hand before she, _lento_ _e dolce_ , rotates it as she withdraws.

Marianne blows noisily into her handkerchief, and it earns a chuckle. “By the by, that other time I saw you, it was in 1781. At the opera ...when it was still in the Palais-Royal.”

Héloïse has to stop and think. “You mean the year it burned down? That spring? Well then. We shall not step out of this church until you tell me all about it.”


	7. Date Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It's a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while._  
>  —Horace 
> 
> Héloïse shows off her other whip and it’s a cabriolet. The original kind, before the internal combustion engine. 
> 
> A few decades too soon I know, but I wanted this to waft like a Chopin nocturne, and like one, it’s short. Though there is some talk about THE GAY™️ in late 18th-century France.
> 
> One Antonio Salieri took over Christophe Gluck’s duties at the Paris Opéra, and 1787 is his last year there.

September 14, 1787, Friday 

————

Surpassed only by their arrival, the egress of opera goers from the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin was a flurry of footmen and coachmen, all eager to lead their charges to the inevitable scrum of carriages spilling onto the avenue and into the humid night. 

Marianne and Héloïse lift their petticoats for the puddles left by the rain that fell late in the performance. They signal with curt nods to the occupants of a number of rococo coupés as they cross the street on foot. 

They stop to gawp at one exaggerated affair. In gold scrollwork and red lacquer, is a massive Chinese palanquin on wheels, with a train of six horses, replete with post-riders that Marianne remarked were too busy tending to their masters’ yapping dogs than the steeds. 

A few streets down, the pair walk to a sleek, tandem-horse chaise for two, with a folding hood, and a platform in the back over the forked suspension for the groom. It was left largely unspoken, but the coachman was there to secure Héloïse’s person, as she clearly preferred to drive herself. 

But not tonight. She doesn’t know the faubourg as well as her companion. Without a word, she offers the reins to Marianne, who, with a slight jolt expertly guides them off of a sloppily paved street and onto the smoother stones on the boulevard.

Neither wanted to suffer the novelty of a debut, and an old standby, an ‘opera seria’ by Lully, rearranged by Gluck and conducted by Salieri, suited the evening.

“Did you like it?”

Marianne turns and fixes her gaze on Héloïse, reading her soft features as they waxed and waned in the lamplight, to the clatter of hooves. “I never much cared for that story, knights, the crusades, scorned women, broken spells... intrigues and strange, occultic goings on in Jerusalem. But I loved the new soprano, and rather liked sitting with you again, in the same box.” 

“And we shall never tire of it.” Héloïse caresses Marianne’s free hand. “I do miss the music that Lully had originally intended. His overtures leave me in a state... that faggot, he understood me. I share your sentiments about the libretto, but I’ve always loved the women in his stories. Armide was too good an Amazon to fall for that sap Renaud.”

“That he is. Women are never as gullible as in the opera.”

Héloïse roars in agreement. “You’re lucky the librettist wasn’t Beaumarchais. They’d all be wearing men’s clothes at some point, strutting about, but to no reasonable end... At least not one that either you or I would come to appreciate.” 

Marianne groans, but as much for the cruel smell of horse shit just then. She negotiates a tight turn that elicits a simultaneous neigh from the filly at their head. “You knew that Louis le Grand refused a premiere of _Armide_ at court, I mean once it was made public that Lully found himself, ah... found himself infatuated with a new youth...or two”

Héloïse is at once incandescent to white-hot. “What hypocrisy! The king very well knew, at court, the kind of itch Lully liked to scratch.”

“My sweet, knowing it at court is one thing, having it all over Paris is quite another. I mean these new rumors, the queen and the Duchess de Duras?” 

Héloïse remembers her last time with the ladies-in-waiting at Versailles, a proximity granted only by the reinstitution of her family into the old order. “Oh, I’ve heard tell of it, the Duchess de Duras, the Duchess de Polignac, the one with the lavender eyes, this and that... the latest of her little loves. I’d never witnessed anything that would confirm my suspicions. Not that they’d ever betray a confidence to me anyway. But the Duchess, she once tried to speak to me in a Breton tongue, the very one spoken in our country, which left me at a loss.” 

“You can speak a few words?”

“The very few father taught. But she and I muddled through courtly Milanese once she found out I spent time there. She had been to Milan and to Pavia... Present company excepted, Louise, I mean Louise-Charlotte, is the smartest woman I know. Takes after her mother.”

Marianne looks back at the coachman, whose smirk belied the fact that he hadn’t been listening as intently as she’d hoped. 

She instead barks at the horse closest to them. “Achille, have you had a word with Louise de Duras, and her mother Anne, the Comtesse de Noailles?” No? How about Gabrielle, the other duchess, the pretty one with the violet eyes?”

“—They were lavender. I looked into them.” Héloïse gives her riding arm a hard pinch, earning a scowl from the recipient. “Don’t mock me, I just paid you a high compliment. You’re not half as funny as you think you are.” 

“Ouch.” Marianne pretends at offense. “Well what you know first-hand is mere gossip to me.” 

“You’re at court with all these commissions, surely you have your own secrets, these princes, and the winsome princesses of the blood that sit for you.” 

“None that I haven’t divulged to you. Verily.” 

Héloïse smacks her lips. “Ah. It’s truly unfortunate that you’re an easy tell, revealing everything up your sleeve so early in the game.” 

“Not everything. With what we have, I resolve to keep twice as many secrets as I shed.”

Héloïse sends her a wink. “As do I.”

They approach the porte-cochère at Marianne’s. “And I’m playing for keeps this time.”

Héloïse’s left hand is over her forehead. “God Almighty, I hope you’re better at marbles because I’ve seen you play cards.”

————


End file.
